The man swallowed as he faced the knowledge of his fate.

“But this is Mr. Hill’s place, Mr. Hill’s call,” I continued neutrally.

Mr. Hill grunted behind and above me. Hisses like steam bubbles escaped from the lava boys, and the quiet tapping of a lot of feet had me turning my head as a flood of pale yellow-white bodies came surging up from the far end of the cavern. They were carrying crude weapons, their big bulging white eyes fixed on us.

I let the merc’s head down to think about what was going to happen as I stood up. “Mr. Elder, I can see you back there. Come on out.”

The Mole Man hissed a word, and the moloids in front of him melted out of the way. He stumped forwards, a wooden staff that was much more than it seemed in his hand. He was very short and squat, with a huge nose, but moved with surety and ease over the rough floor.

“Hill, are you behind this massacre!?” he screeched out, shaking his staff at the bigger man, who loomed so far above him.

“Harvey,” Mr. Hill grunted around his cigar by way of greeting. “Quitcher damn posing. I don’t need punks in Schmot Guy suits to handle you and your boys.” The lava boys behind him hissed, lighting up in red and waving their spears defiantly against the much more numerous moloids, who didn’t look overeager to mess with them, but were certainly pointing at the prone mercs eagerly.

The Mole Man glowered at the bigger man, but he’d already made the point he wasn’t afraid of Mr. Hill for his people, so he turned to me. “Dynamo,” he greeted me warily and carefully.

“Just so you know, if you propose to me again, you’re going into the wall, Mr. Elder,” I replied cordially.

He smacked his toad-like lips under his great beak of a nose, tensing and subtly shifting back. “Yes, yes, I got the message last time.”

“You bloody invaded six surface cities and called it a marriage proposal.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “You even think about doing something so stupid again, and I’m going to reduce you to ash for general purpose of retaining my sanity in the face of such unrelenting empathic stupidity, you got it?” Voltage flared hot and bright in the sulphurous gloom, and his moloids all whimpered and shielded their eyes.

“Uh, yes, I got it, Dynamo,” he muttered, lowering his head, abashed.

“Now, then.” I squatted back down and lifted the merc’s head up again. “Congratulations, you’ve managed to secure the interest of the most influential ruler of Subterranea, Mr. Harvey Elder, whom your newsheets call the Mole Man. Lord of countless gigantic monsters, numberless buried tribes, ancient forgotten technology that can move the very earth... and king and protector of these moloids you just slaughtered.

“He’s someone who has the power and balls to attack the surface world, what, nine times in the past decade or something, just because he doesn’t like idiots like you!

“Congratulations on your utter lack of common sense. You pissed off the most personally powerful ruler down here, and the ruler of the greatest kingdom under the surface. He could totally make your whole home state drop into a pool of lava, and you went and freaking INVADED him.”

The faces of all the mercs didn’t look very happy. Some of them were cursing silently.

The Mole Man was smiling VERY happily. Of course, his face didn’t look happy. It looked like he wanted to eat them.

I held out my hand, and one of the mercs’ guns slithered into my grasp via Vier’s TK. “Mr. Elder, you got any creatures who can tank this kind of stuff, and the upgrades that are going to be coming from it?”

He took it from me eagerly and examined it quickly, hands moving over it deftly as he disassembled it without effort and looked over the parts.

“It... will be dangerous for many of them,” he acknowledged. “Do you know who is behind this?”

“The High Evolutionary.”

“Wyndham dares to make a move against me?!” the Mole Man spluttered instantly, outraged. Sounded like he knew him.

“He’s a racist fanatic. Whenever was he eventually NOT going to make a move against your moloids?” I replied acerbically, waving at his people. “He’s a human ultimist, and you’ve a population of inbred, genetically-restrained subhumans here. Of course he finally did something, the over-educated anal-evolved arsehole.”

“Where is he? I’ll destroy him!” the Mole Man cried out to the sky, gnashing his teeth and shaking his fists in best world-conqueror fashion. His moloids promptly all hooted and cheered in support of his fine display of proper leadership.

The Mountain stood there and glowered in silence, cigar rising and falling in brightness. The Lava Boys all glowed and simmered in perfect time with it. They didn’t need no screaming fits to show off.

“We’ll have to settle for the base where these guys come from, and link it back to him. Wyndham likes to use teleportation, and guards against farseeing and divinations and stuff. He’s hard to pin down.” I hadn’t moved my eyes from those of the merc, and given how they were glowing, he had little choice but to focus on them, although he was glancing over my shoulder at the silent and looming Mr. Hill, dark and thrumming like a forge flame being fanned with every breath, his stony-grey eyes reflecting the crimson of his cigar.

“You got a choice here, Mr. Idiot. I’m not exactly the good cop, but I’m your only chance of getting out of this alive.

“More to the point, I’m the only chance of all of your buddies getting through this alive, because Mr. Elder’s way of getting back at you is going to be dropping your base and everyone inside it into a volcano he starts underneath them, while forgotten monstrosities from the deep chase them screaming around and then eat them.”

Wow, was the Mole Man grinning madly. He liked being talked up by me, he did. He’d make damn sure it all came true, too.

“Mr. Hill would instead take a stroll through the base at one hundred gravities, and reduce the place to a concrete hamburger bun, with your buddies the meat patties in between.”

Mr. Hill exhaled a long and bloody cloud of smoke over my head, his eyes and face not moving at all.

“So, you racist, murderous little bag of primitive-slaughtering shit, do you want yourself and all your buddies to die, or do you want to tell me where your damn base is?”

------

The High Evolutionary’s War had just begun, and it had already run into a snag.

Selling the location brought the mercs their lives. We were gonna find it eventually, because there was more than one group of these yahoos, and all we had to do was let some of them ‘evade the superheroes who really don’t know what they are doing’ and follow them back to their base.

Getting cannibalized or mulched would only buy their buddies a couple more days of life, and then Giganto was going to be feeding on a bunch of them.

They did make me promise that I’d be the one going after their buddies, not Mr. Hill or the Mole Man. They both waved it off, but the dead men weren’t going back home.

Funnily enough, the Tribes considered Subterranea part of the Tribal Alliance, at least when the various leaders weren’t doing kooky stuff like declaring war on the surface world, kidnapping handsome athletes to marry, and other stuff. That also meant they had prisons and places happy to hold the mercs, where Stater jails would simply claim no due authority and let them go.

The mercs were not happy to see Tribals ready to meet them on the other side of the Portal that took them out of there, but given how we’d had them watch the corpses of their friends being butchered and ground up for mushroom nutrition, they got over it.

---

“Castle just pinged me,” Mr. Hill mentioned as we strolled back towards the hot caverns where the lava boys lived. They were holding their buckets of fertilizer happily, trading them back and forth when they got tired of hefting them, that others might have the honor of hoisting the remains of those who had dared face them in battle.

“Yeah?” I asked, waving to a couple of the lava boys I recognized and giving them a sparks show.

“Guys in hardsuits like them idiots, going after drug cartels in Colombia.” He paused significantly. “Users AND refiners AND growers. Weren’t making no exceptions.” He tilted his head to the left, as if listening. “He was equal opportunity, killed them all.”

“Yezzz, we Schmot Peoples can shoot all the criminal and self-destructive tendencies out of the genome.” I rubbed my temples in irritation. “Gods dammit, Mr. Hill, what happens to your Wisdom and Empathy when you evolve yourself Schmot? Do they just punt them to the side of the road?” Killing the farmers? The reason the farmers grew drugs is because they were encouraged by everything from guns to their heads to any other crops being burned to do so!... Maybe some profit motive, but that just meant find a better crop!

His belly laugh was grim. “Where’s the common sense, girl?” he shot right back. “Does he think that the Hag and the Bear are just gonna sit around while he runs around killin’ whoever he wants ta, however many he wants ta?” He chuckled again. “Sama ain’t no saint, and I done my homework on the Subbies, sure. There’s a lot of Deviant battle-beast and slave-race in the Subbies, but Briggs ain’t goin’ after ‘em. If they wanna stay down here and live, it’s fine with him. If they wanna fight, well, he can fight, I reckon. Ain’t heard of no problems with Subbies in the Bear’s lands.”

“I don’t think Mr. Elder is that dumb or crazy. Either that, or any who did such things were extinguished as Deviant pawns. Briggs can have a bit of a mean streak regarding the Deviants, y’know?”

“Not really, but good ta know,” Mr. Hill grunted. “What’d they do ta him?”

“I didn’t ask directly, but I think they raided his fishing village when he was a kid, carted everyone off to one of the subsea cities of Lemuria, and they either died in the slave pits or in the arena. I think the Eternal Gilgamesh attacked the place, and Briggs used the chance to escape.

“He swore he’d bring them all down, and he basically conquered Russia from within to do it.” I paused significantly. “The fact that the Badoon, the Kree, and the Skrulls are basically Deviants, too, doesn’t make him feel positively toward them. They are totally different from human Deviants, sure, but I’m sure he goes cold just thinking about them.”

“Huh.” Mr. Hill thought about that. “Yeah, watching everyone you know die like that, I imagine it could change a man,” he agreed slowly.

“He’d probably be working for Sama if that hadn’t happened. The world would be a very different place.”

“What they gonna do about Wyndham?” he asked shortly.

“The instant he started killing innocents for his eugenics agenda was probably the end for him.” I also tilted my head as I paid attention to the Mark chatter. “Those Purifier teams are all over the place. They are going after drug distributors all over the world... and drug users.”

Mr. Hill inhaled slow, exhaled slow. “Can’t lie, there’s a lot of folks feel them users earned it. They fund the whole damn show.”

“Well, they are innocents, victims, and participants, as well as non-combatants,” I had to agree. “Note they ain’t trying that shit in Tribal Lands...”

“Or Russia, right?” He had his own Markspace contacts now, if not many, but enough to keep old soldiers like him informed of shit.

“Crazy, but not dumb.”

“How you gonna handle their base?”

“Felicia’s on it already. She’s going in, getting the data, and we’ll pick a time to hit it when there’s enough of them there to make it worthwhile, otherwise they’ll just scatter and take out other targets as they are contacted.”